Blog by Trudy K. Cretsinger

SATURDAY 6-PACK: April 7, 2018

A weekly listing of articles, audio clips, and other tidbits I’ve encountered that seemed interesting, insightful, or otherwise useful

Item #1================================

Brother Leonard Pitts has written much this week about the remembrances of the 50th Anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Dr. martin Luther King, Jr. that took place in Memphis this week. All are good, but this one best bridges from then to now (and you can find the other ones from there):

One of the biggest news events of the week is the back-and-forth between the Current Occupant of the Oval Office and leaders in China about tariffs that may (or may not) be coming. With all the tweets and the tits and tats flying back and forth, it’s hard to keep up with it all. However, some lessons from the past may be more helpful. Here’s the three-fer this week. First up is an NPR interview with Glenn Hubbard, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President George W. Bush. That interview references a piece from the Washington Post article involving Andrew Card, President Bush’s Chief of Staff when the steel tariffs were tried back in 2002; that article is included here as well. And then, since I’ve heard several references to Ben Stein’s rather memorable “lecture” on the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, here’s a piece from Marketplace (last August!) , with more insight than the lecture scene provided

The hit sitcom from the very late 80s/early 90s Roseanne has returned. The show is no less controversial now than ever it was then. Now the controversy is about the real-life Roseanne Barr’s support for the Current Occupant of the Oval Office … and how it carries over into her TV alter ego. Part of the attraction that this show has had from the start is that the character of Roseanne is no one’s ideal anything … which helps make the family’s interactions seem oh-so real. And in reality, people like Roseanne Connor are quite likely to have voted for the Current Occupant in the last election. But he should be careful about claiming this as an endorsement. Kareem Abdul Jabbar (yes, that Kareem) explains why:

Speaking of blasts from the past and history lessons and the question of “When will we ever learn?”, here’s an interview with three key players during the financial meltdown at the start of the Great Recession ten years ago. They explain what they did, why they did it, what more they would have liked to have done, think should be done … their regrets and what might have been different … and their concerns about the future. The threesome consists of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner, who started out as President of the New York Fed and then went on to serve as Treasury Secretary under President Barak Obama. Kai Ryssdal interviewed the three of them together and aired segments on Marketplace the last week of March. Here’s the whole thing. It’s over an hour long, but the conversation moves and it is well worth the listen:

We’re now two weeks past the March for Our Lives … and some more actions are being planned to coincide with the 19th Anniversary of the tragedy at Columbine High School in a few weeks. The student activists are keeping gun safety concerns active in the political environment and other places. Here’s a long form piece with keen insights into attitudes and experiences concerning guns. From the New York Times Magazine, Gun Culture is My Culture — And I Fear What It Has Become:

Although mental illness is frequently invoked as a cause for the gun violence , the reality is that the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of than the perpetrators of violence. What would be more helpful regarding mental illness is to recognize the crisis we have regarding care for the people who suffer from these conditions. All too often, police are serving as paramedics or nurses or physicians assistants (initial points of contacts) with jails and prisons filling in as treatment centers. This isn’t the way to do it. Alisa Roth, author of Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, explains why in an interview for Marketplace. (Her comparison imagining if we were to treat heart disease the same way is chilling and provocative!) The other piece in this two-fer is a local report on an approach that is working much better.